“Your Story Becomes Our Universe”: Fan Edits, Shitposts, and the BTS Database

K-Pop has always depended on multimedia performance and platforms to reach global audiences, and on the versatility of its performers as not just singers, rappers and dancers, but also actors, fashion icons, and television and Internet personalities. With each new game, BTS circulates in proliferating media forms—from in-game cosmetic “skins” to mobile, manipulable elements in a digital sandbox—that result in novel forms of fan mobilization. In “‘Your Story Becomes Our Universe’: Fan Edits, Shitposts, and the BTS Database,” Jaclyn Zhou asks how BTS games such as BTS Universe Story–and the communities and practices of play surrounding them–give new shape to ongoing conversations in K-Pop fandom and scholarship about fan labor, the ownership of digital assets, the relationship between idols and their images, and the limits of intimacy between fans and idols.